Czernovitz expelled its Jews, and so did Vienna, Prague, Budapest,
and Lemberg. Now these cities live without Jews, and their few
descendants, scattered through the world, carry memory like a
wonderful gift and a relentless curse.

Aharon Appelfeld

This is a book about
a place that cannot be found in any contemporary atlas, and about a
community for whom it remained alive “like a wonderful gift” and
“relentless curse” long after its disappearance. It is a historical
account of a German-Jewish Eastern European culture that flourished
from the mid nineteenth century until its shattering and dispersal
in the era of the Second World War. But it is also a family and
communal memoir spanning three generations that explores the
afterlife, in history and memory, of the city of Czernowitz.

Nowadays, of course,
Czernowitz is nowhere. As a political entity, it ceased to exist
long ago, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire
in 1918. Its name now is Chernivtsi—a city located in the
southwestern region of the Republic of the Ukraine, east of the
Carpathian Mountains, on the River Pruth, some fifty kilometers
north of the present-day border of Romania. After the First World
War, when it fell under Romanian authority and became part of
Greater Romania, it was called Cernăuţi. Subsequently, under Soviet
rule after the Second World War, it was renamed Chernovtsy.

But for many of the
surviving Jews who lived there in the decade before the First World
War and in the interwar years—now “scattered,” as Appelfeld notes,
“through the world”—the place forever remained Czernowitz, capital
of the outlying Austrian-Habsburg imperial province of the Bukowina,
the “Vienna of the East,” a city in which (in the words of its most
famous poet, Paul Celan) “human beings and books used to live.”[i]
For members of these generations, the long imperial connection of
Czernowitz to Vienna, and their own whole-hearted embrace of the
German language, its literature, and the social and cultural
standards of the Austro-Germanic world, are intimately connected—a
core constituent of their identity. Yiddish certainly remained
alive for many of them, as a language spoken in some of their homes
and as a predominant language in nearby villages and among urban
intellectual proponents of Jewish diaspora nationalism. But, as
many of their parents and even grandparents had done, they had
accepted the premise inherent in the century-long process of Jewish
emancipation and acculturation to Germanic culture that had taken
place in lands once ruled by the Habsburgs. One could remain a Jew
in religious belief, was the basis of this premise, while also
becoming culturally, economically, and politically integrated within
the Austro-Habsburg dominant social order. The promise of
admission to modernity and cosmopolitanism—of turning away from the
poverty, segregation, and what they perceived as the restrictive
lifeways of shtetl Jewry—was its motivating assumption.
Karl-Emil Franzos, the Bukowina’s first internationally famed
German-language writer, best characterizes the complicated cultural
identity of most assimilated Bukowina Jews at the end of the
nineteenth century: “I wasn’t yet three feet tall, when my father
told me: ‘Your nationality is neither Polish, nor Ruthenian, nor
Jewish—you are German.’ But equally often he said, even then:
‘According to your faith you are a Jew.’”[ii]

Even after
Czernowitz’s and the Bukowina’s annexation into Greater Romania in
1918 and the institution of a policy of “Romanianization,” a
predominant segment of the Jewish population of the city and region
remained devoted to the German language and its culture.
Czernowitz, the city, with its Vienna look-alike center, its
Viennese-inspired architecture, avenues, parks, and cafés, largely
remained a physical manifestation of this continuing allegiance to,
and nostalgic longing for, a by-gone Austrian imperial past.

The continuing
vitality and strength of this identification is not surprising. It
attests to the positive connection so many of Czernowitz’s Jews had
drawn between Jewish emancipation and assimilation in the imperial
Habsburg realm, and the significant social, political, and cultural
rewards that this process had yielded. Despite the immediate, and
the increasingly vehement, anti-Semitic assaults on Jewish
emancipation and assimilation that occurred in the imperial core and
its periphery in the nineteenth and early twentieth century,
citizenship privileges enjoyed by Jews were not withdrawn. In
contrast, for the majority of the approximately 100,000 Jews in the
Bukowina region in the immediate years after 1918, Romanian rule and
Romanianization closed doors to rights and opportunities that they
had enjoyed for decades under the Austrians.[iii]
For several years after Romania gained control of the area—indeed,
until 1924—Jews in the Bukowina were denied the full citizenship
rights from which they had benefited under Austrian rule. Their new
legal definition and exclusion as “foreigners” greatly inhibited
their cultural integration and social advancement within the Greater
Romania that they now inhabited. In this context, the German
language in which they communicated with each other, and the
Austro-German/Jewish cultural background they shared, provided them
with an alternative basis of continuing group identity.

It is perhaps this
point that is most startling: that even when political reality
indicated otherwise, Jews here kept alive anidea of a
pre-First World War multi-cultural and multi-lingual tolerant city
and a modern, cosmopolitan, culture in which German literature,
music, art and philosophy flourished among a significant majority of
their numbers. Instead of the Cernăuţi in which they now lived,
they continued to nourish and perpetuate the idea of “Czernowitz” as
it had been transmitted to them physically and in cultural memory.
The place where these Jews grew up was thus already haunted by the
memory of a lost “world of yesterday” that many of them had actually
never experienced but only inherited from parents and grandparents
who had enjoyed the benefits of Jewish life under the Habsburgs.[iv]
If, in their youth they held on to that lost world nostalgically, it
was not simply to reconstitute or to mourn what they posited as a
better imperial past. It was also one of the ways in which they
resisted Romanianization and its increasing social, political and
intellectual restrictions. In this sense, their “resistant
nostalgia” reflected what Svetlana Boym has characterized as
inherent in all nostalgic constructions: the longing “for a home
that not longer exists or has never existed.”[v]

At the same time,
however, Czernowitz/Cernăuţi was also that place where Jews suffered
anti-Semitism, internment in a Fascist Romanian/Nazi ghetto, and
Soviet occupation. It was where they were forced to wear the yellow
“Jew” star, and where, a fortunate minority among them, managing to
escape deportation, survived the Holocaust. Of the more than 60,000
Jews who inhabited the city at the start of Second World War, only
some 25,000 were alive at its conclusion. When, after the war, the
bulk of these survivors left the, by then again, Soviet-ruled
Chernovtsy, they thought it was forever. They knew that the place
they had considered their home had now definitively been taken from
them. Czernowitz in the Bukowina, now twice lost to Jews, came to
persist only as a projection—as an idea physically disconnected from
its geographical location, and tenuously dependent on the
vicissitudes of personal, familial and cultural memory.

.

Our primary goal in
Ghosts of Homeis to illuminate the distinct culture
of the city of Czernowitz and its Jewish inhabitants during the
Habsburg years before the outbreak of the First World War, and the
afterlife of that urbane cultural ideal over subsequent decades. By
focusing on how the inhabitants of this one city constructed their
life worlds over time, we trace the exhilarating promises and
shattering disappointments associated with the process of Jewish
emancipation and assimilation. Within the span of this objective,
moreover, our book engages two relatively unexplored chapters of
recent European Jewish history. It tells the story of a place and
of a Jewish population that was confronted by a largely
Romanian-perpetrated Holocaust during the Second World War, facing
different structures of persecution, deportation, and possibilities
of survival than those characterizing the more thoroughly studied
Nazi Judeocide in Poland and other areas of German-occupied Europe.
And it considers the positive as well as negative aspects of the
role that the Stalinist Soviet Union played for Jewish refugees from
Fascism and Nazism: the possibility it offered them for rescue and
survival, but also the consequences of its own anti-Semitism,
repression, and persecution. Within a larger analytical framework,
this work also particularizes how Jewish Czernowitz/Cernăuţi/Chernovtsy
engaged and participated in some of the grand narratives of the
European twentieth century: the intensity, reach, but also the
tragedy, of the German-Jewish symbiosis; the encounter between
Fascism and Communism; the rise of Zionism and modern Yiddishism;
the displacement of refugees; and the shadow of Holocaust memory on
the children and grandchildren of survivors.

Two temporal levels
structure our narrative in Ghosts of Home. On the level of
the past, our book is an account of Jewish Czernowitz and key
moments in its history over the course of the past
hundred-and-twenty-five years. On the level of the present, it is
fueled by a collaborative quest, reflecting four journeys we made to
Ukrainian Chernivtsi—in 1998, 2000, 2006, and 2008—and to
Transnistria, during two of these visits. The first of our trips
inspired this project. We made it with Carl and Lotte Hirsch, our
parents/parents-in-law—their first return to the city of their birth
since their hurried departure (with false papers) from Soviet-ruled
Chernovtsy in 1945. With them as guides and mentors, we searched
for physical traces of old Czernowitz and Cernăuţi, for material
connections to the places, residences and times that had been so
central to their, and to their fellow exiles’, sense of origin and
identification.

In that regard, our
first journey could be characterized as a “roots” trip. But it
differed in two significant respects from other second-generation
“return” journeys to old Jewish East European towns chronicled in a
number of recent books. We were fortunate in being accompanied by
articulate eye-witnesses, and to hear and record accounts they
narrated in place as we walked, explored, and videotaped the
time-worn but still largely intact streets and sites of what had
been Habsburg-era Czernowitz. Secondly, unlike others who had
undertaken such journeys, we were not primarily motivated to travel
to Western Ukraine in search for traces of sites or family members
victimized or erased from records by Holocaust destruction.
Certainly, as the chapters in Part I of this book reveal, the
surprisingly divergent experiences of Cernăuţi Jews during the
Second World War did come to absorb our interest during our
explorations of the city. Yet, what most fascinated us initially
was the fact that its Jewish survivors—even those who had lived
through deportation and immense suffering in Transnistria—continued
to maintain and to transmit to our post-war generation such strong,
positive, nostalgic memories of a city and culture that had long
disappeared in reality, though not in the realm of remembrance,
image, and re-creation.

We went on our
second journey to Chernivtsi in 2000, without accompanying parents,
to a city no longer unfamiliar to us. Confident enough of our
bearings, we were now able to act as guides for a cousin, David
Kessler, and a colleague, Florence Heymann—second-generation
Czernowitzers like Marianne, who were visiting the place for the
first time.[vi]
We set off as academic researchers, intent on mining the city’s
public and private archives, and on broadening and deepening our
knowledge of Czernowitz/Cernăuţi and its Jewish community, for the
book we had begun to conceive. Yet in the course of our
investigations, the ever-darker side of the city and region’s story
emerged in greater detail. We found material and documentary
evidence of old anti-Semitism, Habsburg-era, Romanian, as well as
Soviet, of persecutions, impossible choices, and painful compromises
faced by the city’s Jews during the Fascist and Communist periods,
of struggles for survival during the Second World War. And we also
found evidence of normality and continuity, of kindness and rescue,
in these grim historical circumstances. We made a side trip to
Transnistria then, to the region to which Jews from Czernowitz, the
Bukowina, and nearby Bessarabia (now Moldova) were deported, and
where approximately 200,000 of them perished. We went in order to
see and to actually make contact with the place that its survivors
had referred to as “the forgotten cemetery.” There we also searched
for, and were ultimately able to find, remains of the once notorious
Romanian-run Vapniarka concentration camp to which David Kessler’s
father and a number of other Cernăuţi Jews had been deported—a camp
whose very existence had been erased from the records and memories
of the present-day residents of the sizeable town near which it had
been located.

Our third trip in
2006, basis for Part III of this book, reflected a somewhat
different intent on our part. This time we went to Chernivtsi, and
through Transnistria, to participate in a large multi-generational
gathering of people who had either been born in inter-war Cernăuţi,
or who were children and grandchildren of Czernowitzers. The group
consisted of persons from all over the world who had “met” through
the internet and World Wide Web on what had, in effect, over the
course of two or three years, become a site in which Czernowitz was
actively being reconstituted in virtual reality, through extensive
contributions and on-line postings of photos, maps, documents,
memoirs, recipes, and links to relevant scholarly and popular
materials. This group’s passionate interest and heartfelt effort to
discover and re-discover minute details about the history of a place
where many of them had lived only a few childhood years—and from
which some had been deported as very young children—confirmed for us
the unusual nexus between nostalgic and traumatic memory that
Czernowitz elicited among its Jewish survivors and their
descendants.

We returned to
Chernivtsi again in 2008 to find the city in the midst of ambitious
renovations in preparing to celebrate its 600th
anniversary. Accompanied by Cornel Fleming from London and, again,
by Florence Heymann, we went as representatives of the growing
Czernowitz-L internet listserv group that had taken an active part
in urging city officials to include Chernivtsi’s Jewish history in
the planned commemorations. Bearing images and objects donated by
list members, and our own knowledge of Bukowina history, we came to
participate in discussions about the small museum of Bukowina Jewish
history and culture that was in the process of being installed in
two rooms of the former Czernowitz Jewish National House. Except
for a few memorial plaques on buildings formerly inhabited by Jewish
writers and intellectuals, the extensive Jewish contributions to the
city had, until that moment, been forgotten, if not erased from its
public face. With the planned establishment of this tiny museum,
Chernivtsi was entering a new phase of acknowledgment of its layered
multi-cultural past. But the memorial debates we engaged only
served to demonstrate how fraught the politics of memory are, and
are likely to continue to be in the foreseeable future, in the
Ukraine.

The dialogue between
the past and present levels of this book raises some of the key
questions that shape our inquiry: How did this small provincial
Habsburg capital produce such a rich and urbane cosmopolitan
culture—one that would remain so vivid and powerful in the
imagination of the generation of Jews who came of age in Romanian
Cernăuţi during the interwar years? What had made their
identification with Czernowitz and its Habsburg-era German-cultural
appeal so strong as to enable them to preserve and protect their
positive memories of the city in the face of devastating negative
and traumatic experiences? What role did the Habsburg Empire’s
multi-ethnic tolerance, however real or mythic in retrospect, play
in the construction of this layered and contradictory memory? How,
moreover, did nostalgia for the past, and negative memories of
anti-Semitic discrimination and persecution, co-exist and inflect
each other in the outlook of the city’s Jews, and how were these
memories passed down over generations? And how are Jews currently
remembered in the Eastern European cities they so actively helped to
build before being deported or exiled from them?

To address these
questions and illuminate our representation of Czernowitz’s past, we
rely on a variety of historical and literary source materials. We
employ official and private contemporary documents, public and
family archival materials, letters, memoirs, photographs,
newspapers, essays, poetry, fiction, internet postings, as well as
material remnants that we think of as testimonial objects.[vii]
Central to our approach is the use of oral and video accounts from
old Czernowitzers and their offspring—histories and narrations that
we collected and taped in the course of our research in the Ukraine,
Israel, Austria, Germany, France, and the United States, or that we
heard and watched in oral history archives in several places. These
materials are more than evidentiary sources for us. They focus our
narrative around telling individual anecdotes, images and objects,
serving as “points of memory” that open small windows to the past.[viii]
They also enable us to reflect more theoretically on how memory and
transmission work both to reveal and to conceal certain traumatic
recollections, and how fragmentary, tenuous and deceptive our access
to the past can be. In the effort to capture the effects of the
past on the present and of the present on the past, and to trace the
effects of the “telling” on the witness and listener, our book
exemplifies what James Young has called “received history.” It
explores “both what happened and how it is passed down to us.”[ix]
And, in that process, it exposes the holes in memory and knowledge
that puncture second-generation accounts—accounts motivated by needs
and desires that, at times, rely on no more than speculative
investment, identification and invention.

Our own two voices
and reflections are certainly present within this book, singly and
in dialogue. We write collaboratively, from the perspectives of a
literary and cultural critic and of a historian, both active in the
emergent field of memory studies. But we would enjoin our readers
not to assume that our distinct disciplinary training is reflected
in different sections of this book, or that the “I” we use in
different chapters is in any way stable. On the contrary, in the
process of writing and rewriting, our voices have often merged and
crossed. Our perspectives are those of the Romanian-born daughter
of parents who were born, raised, and who survived the Holocaust in
the place they never ceased to call Czernowitz, and of the
Bolivian-born son of Austrian refugees who had fled to South America
from Hitler’s Vienna. Family narratives are important components of
Ghosts of Home, but this book is not a family chronicle.
Instead, we think of it as hybrid in genre—as an intergenerational
memoir and an interdisciplinary and self-reflexive work of
historical/cultural exploration. It engages many individual voices,
including our own, within a web of narratives, recollections and
analyses that connect with each other, and over time, through
familial and communal relationships. Such a web of recollections
and interconnections, together with our other historical and
cultural source materials, allows for the affective side of the
afterlife of Czernowitz to emerge in fuller and richer dimensions.

The title of our
book, “Ghosts of Home,” highlights this affective aspect of
personal, familial, and cultural remembrance. But it also points to
the contradictions that shape persistent memories. It evokes the
haunting continuity of Czernowitz as place and idea for generations
of Jews who survived its political demise—a spectral return
emanating both seductive recollections of a lost home and
frightening reminders of persecution and displacement. These layers
and contradictions, we found, are still remarkably absent from
present-day Chernivtsi, a city whose repeated twentieth-century
transformations—albeit materially evident in its architecture and
urban design—are just beginning to be acknowledged in its cultural
landscape. When we first traveled there with Carl and Lotte Hirsch
in 1998, visitors, like the four of us, searching for traces of this
history, appeared like ghostly revenants or haunting reminders of a
forgotten world: we unsettled the present by refusing to allow the
past to disappear into oblivion. But now, ten years later, this is
no longer so. Roots travel has become ever more popular, and 2008
Chernivtsi has made space for tourist groups with several new or
renovated hotels, new restaurants with translated menus, English
language city maps. Tour buses pull up on the city’s central
squares on a regular basis, spewing families of survivors and their
descendants from Israel, Western Europe, Australia and the
Americas. What accounts for this dramatic shift? Certainly, the
economic evolution of Eastern Europe since the dissolution of the
Soviet Union, and the increased availability of the internet with
the multiplication of genealogical and cultural sites that
disseminate more and more information, have made travel to places of
origin easier and thus perhaps also more compelling. But what do
these trips to the past actually reveal? What do we find when we
identify the streets where our forebears walked, the houses they
inhabited, the locations where they suffered mistreatment,
deportation, extermination? These, too, are among the central
questions propelling our inquiry in Ghosts of Home.

.

A Note on
Translations

Unless
otherwise indicated, all translations into English are by the
authors. Translations of Paul Celan are by John Felstiner.

Notes to Preface

[i]
Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the
Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,”
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, ed. and trans.
John Felstiner (New York: Norton, 2001), 395.

[viii]
We use this notion, “points of memory,” as an alternative to
Pierre Nora’s well-known, but more nationally based “lieu”
or site of memory. See Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory:
Rethinking the French Past (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996).

[ix]
James Young, “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust,”
History and Theory 36, no. 4 (December 1997)